Sample Post II

Etymological Dirge, by Heather McHugh

Epigraph:*'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear.

Calm comes from burning.
Tall comes from fast.
Comely doesn't come from come.
Person comes from mask.

The kin of charity is whore,
the root of charity is dear.
Incentive has its source in song
and winning in the sufferer.

Afford yourself what you can carry out.
A coward and a coda share a word.
We get our ugliness from fear.
We get our danger from the lord.

What strikes me about this poem is that it reads something like a series of equations, which makes the poem feel like it's arguing a case, and leading to a logical conclusion. Each set of words she uses gets its own line, and the relationship between the two words in the set is the same in one aspect: it's based in etymology (history of the meaning of a word, the study of word roots). For example, the English word "tall" comes from the word that in Old English meant "swift" or "fast". In the next line, the poet moves from pointing out what hidden meanings may lie in words to pointing out that not all words that seem to have a source in common do--"comely," which means "pretty," doesn't have the same root as "come" does. By the end of the poem, the poet has moved her sets of words from what seem like random pairs to pairs like "ugliness" and "fear," and "danger" and "the lord." After starting with simple relationships between words, she's expanded to the biggest questions people philosophize and write literature about--the nature of a human relationship to what we may perceive as a higher power. If you look back at the epigraph, it turns out that she's had the Christian concept of God in mind the whole poem--"We get our danger from the lord" echoes back to "'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear." I love this poem because its sense doesn't settle easily, and it has a feeling of being endlessly layered with meanings and histories, as the flat surface idea of "the human relationship to God" is endlessly layered and historical. I've read this poem over the course of a year about fifteen times or so, but I've never gotten the feeling that I'd figured it out, or that I'd reached the end of what it had to offer. I think she's critiquing one characterization of what God is (the sort that Amazing Grace advances--that God has something fundamental to do with fear), but I can't say that in a final, certain way, or in a concise paraphrase. This kind of complexity, this sense of repeated rewards with repeated reading, is something my favorite poems frequently have in common.


*"A motto or quotation, as at the beginning of a literary composition, setting forth a theme."--dictionary.com. A poet uses an epigraph to set up some kind of reference point that isn't actually part of the poem--it's usually a quotation written by someone else. In this case, it's a line from the hymn, "Amazing Grace," which you as a reader are expected to recognize (pretty reasonable, since it's one of the most widely-known religious songs in English, though plenty of times you have to look up epigraphs to get anything out of them. It's useful to do that anyway, generally--the lines before and after this one may illuminate other layers of meaning, too).